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Showing posts from April, 2013

Android code signing

We covered a new security feature introduced in the last Jelly Bean maintenance release in our last post and, before you know it, a  new tag  has already popped up in AOSP. Google I/O is just around the corner, and some interesting bits and pieces are trickling into the AOSP master branch , so it's probably time for a new post. There are plenty of places where you can get your rumour fix regarding I/O 2013 and it looks like build JDQ39E is going to be somewhat boring , so we will explore something different instead: code signing. This particular aspect of Android has remained virtually unchanged since the first public release, and is so central to the platform, that is pretty much taken for granted. While neither Java code signing, nor its Android implementation are particularly new, some of the finer details are not particularly well-known, so we'll try to shed some more light on those. The first post of the series will concentrate on the signature formats used while the nex